Any AI model can help with badly converted 29.97 R2 Source? (Ghosting)

[oberonz]

Believe it or not this is the best source for Transformers Headmasters - the R2 Japanese release from Pioneer. The rest North American, Spanish and Australian releases are a total mess. Not that the R2 isn't a mess - those are just even more messy.

Clearly someone had the brilliant idea of going from 23.976 to 29.97 by using blending similar to how avisynth does "Convertfps". Bobbing the source leaves an incredible amount of ghosting and blended frames everywhere. Srestore helps but not that much. I also tried feeding the Srestore result to Topaz Themis. It was a hit or miss. Topaz restored SOME frames in pans and zooms but made any other scenes worse.

Any ideas on how to improve this - maybe with some AI model for Chainner or something else? I already know the garbage in, garbage out rule. I am just trying here before throwing up the towel.

[Selur]

To me, it looks like there are around 8 unique frames per second, so either frame interpolation or duplicate frames.
When going for duplicate frames, maybe try IVTC, QTGMC(InputType=2,EZDenoise=5.0) and multiple 'sRestore'-calls (or cDeblend-calls), that should replace most of the blends with duplicates, additionally throw in some denoising, dehalo, etc.
I played around with it and threw probably too much denoising at it,... (see attachment)

Cu Selur

Ps.: haven't seen any model that removed blends (something like BasicVSR++ will remove some), basic models that you throw in chaiNNer&Co usually work on one frame at a time, so no temporal awareness which kind of makes it hard to remove blends.

[oberonz]

That's a great result. I'll try your suggestions. Thank you so much. You're right about Chainner and co. They can't do much for temporal artifacts unfortunately.